Conn. lawmakers unveil bipartisan gun control plan
With an announcement of sweeping proposals to curb gun violence, Connecticut lawmakers said they are hoping to send a message to Congress and other state legislators across the country: A bipartisan agreement on gun control is possible.

The NRA Expands Its Reach With New Spokesmen
Guys like Wayne LaPierre have done a terrific job for the NRA, but the organization knows that with gun rights under fire to a greater extent than we have seen in recent years, it needs to reach out to the broadest possible constituencies. So NRA News has recruited several effective new spokesmen to carry the pro-self defense, pro-individual choice, pro-gun message.

Hide the Decline

Environment &
“Green Energy”

European industry flocks to U.S. to take advantage of cheaper gas
The sprawling chemical plant in this city along the Rhine River has been a jewel of Germany’s manufacturing-led economy for more than a century. But the plunging price of natural gas in the United States has European companies setting sail across the Atlantic to stay competitive.

How the Hockey Stick Crumbled: A Post Mortem
Last month, a group of scientists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott launched the latest salvo in the global warming war. They announced that they had reconstructed the last 11,000 years of Earth climate history, based on various proxies, and had found that in the 20th century there was an unprecedented uptick in temperature.

War & Terror

The Gory Details About Terrorist Teacher Kathy Boudin
Katherine Boudin is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and has been named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. She is also a communist, a Weather Underground radical, a terrorist, and a convicted felon.

National

Two 11-Year-Olds Receive Threats for Testifying Against Same-Sex Marriage
In the past two months, in attempts to offer an argument against same-sex marriage, two children have testified before their state legislators, countering other children who have been testifying for it. The two children testifying against it have either been crudely insulted or received death threats.

WisCon’s Feminist Failfandom Brigade Gets Locus April Fool’s Piece Taken Down
In an effort to prove that they’re not dour, humorless, thin-skinned avatars of political correctness with authoritarian tendencies, Wiscon’s Feminist failfandom brigade had my contribution to Locus Online’s April Fools Day festivities taken down. (Note that, under the transparent pseudonym of L. Ron Creepweans, I’ve participated in every Locus online April Fools Day since 2002.)

Missouri College Drops Student Loans
A small college in Missouri has come up with a surprisingly simple solution to the student loan crisis: it will no longer accept students who take out loans to pay for tuition. Instead, for the 90 percent of its students who require some form of financial aid, the college offers students a number of on-campus work opportunities. Rather than cash, students earn credits for tuition.

Study: K-12 Admin. Employment Outpaces Student Growth
The Friedman Foundation for Economic Choice recently released a study that showed the amount of administrators (non-teachers) in the K-12 public education system has increased over 700 percent since 1950, while the amount of students has increased by only 96 percent.

What’s the Matter With Vassar?
A sad and at times bizarre story out of Vassar shows how profoundly troubled America’s colleges now are. The campus fossil-fuel divestment campaign that’s swept across the nation over the past few months has intensified the atmosphere of leftist indoctrination now typical of many schools, turning classic notions of education as the free exchange of ideas into a distant memory. In the blink of an eye, fossil fuel producers have been turned into the equivalent of apartheid enforcers, while the Occupy movement has risen from the dead to become a free-ranging campus mob.

6-y.o. Who Walked Alone to Post Office May be Removed from Her Home
This is the continuing story of the 6-year-old detained by the cops for walking outside. It is disturbing and distressing. The family needs pro bono legal help. If any of you are lawyers or know someone who can help, please let me know and I will forward the info to the family.

It Doesn’t Take a Tinfoil Hat to Critique Common Core
Contrary to the suggestion of Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern on NRO yesterday, you do not have to sport a tinfoil tricorn to believe Common Core curriculum and testing requirements are not only low-quality, but yet another threat to the American tradition of individual liberty and limited government.

Obama: “I am constrained… by a system that our Founders put in place.”
“You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.”

San Fransisco is collecting detailed information on people’s trash and compiling int into a database
It was still dark out at 5:30 a.m. when I met up with James Slattery in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. I hopped in his car and we drove until we spotted a pair of headlamp beams on the sidewalk. Banaag Novicio and Nora Calderón – a pair of municipal cart auditors – were looking through curbside trash cans. They’d been working for at least 30 minutes already, walking from house to house, methodically popping open the lids of green (compost), blue (recycling) and black (landfill) bins to see which homes were correctly sorting their trash and which ones weren’t.

MSNBC’s Harris-Perry: America’s ‘Kids Belong to Their Communities’
On March 23, my colleague Mark Finkelstein noted how MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry considers the unborn child a “thing” which takes a “lot of money” to “turn into a human,” costing thousands of dollars to care for each year of his/her life. Now it appears that Harris-Perry thinks that, after they’re born, children fundamentally belong to the state.

Economy
& Taxes

97% Of Spanish Social Security Pension Fund In Domestic Bonds
In January, we discussed the stunning fact that Spain’s social security pension fund was 90% allocated to Spanish sovereign debt. The latest data shows that this farcical epic reach-around has become even more ridiculous as, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the fund’s holdings are now 97% weighted to sovereign bonds.

The Job Market, Now and In the Future
This story about the current job environment for twenty-somethings is a good jumping-off point to talk about one of the dangers our society faces in the coming years: we’re eating our seed corn.

Obama budget to take aim at wealthy IRAs
The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

International

Russia’s Long Game in the Mediterranean
It’s not clear how much clever planning goes into decisions that are taken on the fly in the middle of a financial crisis, but as some of the dust settles in Cyprus, the Greek part of the island—bruised, battered, angry at Europe, hating and fearing the Turks—is going to need friends. There’s a short list of available partners, and given the depth of Cyprus’ likely future economic problems, the island is going to have to pay a high price for such future friends.

Greek neo-Nazi Party Looks Abroad
Greece’s radical neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, has become the country’s third greatest political force, according to polls. Now it’s seeking to put down roots “wherever there are Greeks,” including in Germany, Australia, Canada, and the US.

4 sisters in India injured in acid attack, one serious
Four sisters, all of them teachers, suffered burn injuries when two unidentified men on motorcycle threw acid on them in Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday. The women, Kamerjahan (26), Ayisha (25), Esha (23) and Sanam (20), were attacked while they were returning from the Hindu Inter College in Kandhal. They were on invigilation duty for the UP board exam.

Five die in Christian-Muslim clashes in Egypt
Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in some of the worst sectarian violence in Egypt for months.

Opinion

Don Young, and the Democrats’ Homer Simpson Problem
The smart set at the Washington Post figures the Republican Party has an “Archie Bunker problem.” The reason? A single comment about “wetbacks” by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), and the Washington Post springs into action.

Today, Cyprus, Tomorrow …
“Government is theft.”
The old libertarian battle cry came to mind when the news hit, two weeks ago, that Cyprus was about to confiscate 7 percent of all the insured deposits in the island’s two biggest banks. Nicosia also planned to siphon off 10 percent of uninsured deposits, those above 100,000 euros ($130,000), and use that cash as well to finance Cyprus’ share of a eurozone bailout.

Marriage, Procreation and Historical Amnesia
Not surprisingly, my Sunday column raising the possibility that the successes of the gay marriage movement might be having some modest influence on marriage’s overall decline left liberals (and many others) unpersuaded.

Schools push a curriculum of propaganda
The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers “instruction” synonymous with “propaganda,” which in the patois of progressivism is called “consciousness-raising.”

VDH 2014
Here’s an idea for beleaguered California Republicans looking for someone to run against Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014: Why not Victor Davis Hanson?

Creating Dependency, One Mouthful at a Time
The number of Americans receiving “free” government benefits has soared, and this expansion seems unstoppable even as the economy recovers. Less obvious than the depressing numbers is how this assistance inculcates a dependency inimical to a free people.

Why Is California Hosed? Blame ‘The Bloomberg Syndrome’
“Nice puff piece on San Francisco’s Trash Inspectors” in the Atlantic, one of Ace’s co-bloggers quips. “I can’t quite put my thumb on why California has a debt issue. It couldn’t be paying people to do stuff like this can it?” The piece highlights — I take it back, praises — nanny-state intrusiveness to the nth-degree

Decline And Fall Of The New Rome
Rampant inflation, caused by debasement of the currency, government corruption and nanny state corrective action that makes matters worse. Declining trade, caused by wars to control the empire, massive military over-reach and ever increasing spending on the military – funded by increases in taxation on the citizens, especially those least in a position to pay.